Help...There is no STOP!

I am a newbie here. Bought the Sansa Fuze today from BestBuy and am very pleased with it.

So far, it seems to me…the mp3 music can only be paused, not stopped. Say you go to main Home page after you finished listening to music, there is this PAUSE thing showing on the bar at the bottom. When I am done with the music, I just want to STOP it completely. How to?

Same thing happens to the radio. Once you come back to Home after you are DONE listening to the radio, it still plays at the bar at the bottom. How to STOP or quit radio completely? 

It is “stopped” in that it’s not playing anymore.  As soon as you pick something else to listen to it will no longer be “paused” on that track.  I remember a long time ago when I first started using my e250 having the same feeling as you have.  It’s really a convenience, until you do pick something else to listen to it will always remember where you left off on that track.

I know. It’s really not very intuitive!

would rather they used the centre button for a general stop button than to rotate through the album art, which really if I wanted to look at I’d look at the cd cover! And they could shift the eq easily enough.

It’s the same on the view, but on that for video centre button DOES stop, but not on music/mp3. Not consistent.

S

Not only is there not a STOP button, but there is also no way of stopping the music unless you choose to play music from another source such as the FM radio.

So…this FUZE is always playing some music

  • unless the music is paused; or

  • unless the unit is turned off.

Who came up with this idea of a car with no brakes? It stops unless you turn the key off or it hits something! How could one make a music player with no STOP button? Who are the parents of these engineers? What school they went to?

Message Edited by flymajorfly on 03-31-2008 05:40 PM

i can not think of one current mp3 player with a stop button. 

if you want to stop a song from playing just pause it. this make it very easy to come back to the same place where you left off.

sorry you do not like it but that is the way all devices i know of are. (including ipod) 

I guessed as much with the ipod as it has the same general controls as sansas top end offerings. I dislike it even more that it’s a precedent that others including sansa have followed as the defacto standard without redesign or rational though.

‘car with no brakes’

very apt.

Easy enough to work around, just turn your brain to mush and think pause each time you want stop.

S

tifosi wrote:

I guessed as much with the ipod as it has the same general controls as sansas top end offerings. I dislike it even more that it’s a precedent that others including sansa have followed as the defacto standard without redesign or rational though.

 

‘car with no brakes’

 

very apt.

 

Easy enough to work around, just turn your brain to mush and think pause each time you want stop.

 

S

this is a silly topic thats i have seen brought up 101 times.

Theres no logical reason for a stop button. You had a stop button on tape tecks and cd players because there was physical parts moving and stuff had to stop moving.

Theres no point to this in a product that has no moving parts.

I mean really, lets say we are listening to music. We decide we want to stop the music, to do what? turn it off? play somethign else? look at pictures? I mean why do you have the need to stop something that there is no need to, just select the next action.

It was a marketing design and idea that stuck to us in old generations and is simply going to fade out. Your kids dont have a problem with it, and either will the next generations.

I bet you still use windows 98 as well. =P

Message Edited by Enigma on 04-01-2008 07:56 AM

Enigma!  Is that why it won’t sync with my Windows 3.1 machine?  I was going crazy trying to drill a USB port into it.

Hehehe.  I was thinking of making a DIN adaptor for the cassette port.

Bob  :stuck_out_tongue: 

What Enigma says is true, but I do feel the need for a stop feature. So a work around to it is:

Start voice recording and stop (don’t save). Now the player should be fully idle. 

Thank You, Thoma. Some kids were starting to accuse me of an ancient dinosaur. I wonder what they would say if they knew I hold two degrees in Computer Engineering.

I agree to the statement “because there is no mechanical parts in it, therefore there is no need for a STOP button” for the most part. Putting the mp3 player on PAUSE or Radio on MUTE does stop the sound. But I am truly bothered by the fact that there is this bottom ticker showing I am still on mp3 music or radio - which I am not on anymore.

Comparatively speaking…WinAmp and Windows Media Player have stop buttons while iTunes player lack the STOP button. While I must admit Apple has design superiority over Windows, I absolutely disagree to Jobs’ MyWay-or-HighWay approach. Try import a CD into mp3 using iTunes. All the songs in that CD should stay in one folder, right? “No,” said Steve Jobs. If a Norah Jones album has one song that has another artist name attached – like Norah Jones featuring Jay Zee, iTunes creates another folder for this one song sung by Norah Jones featuring Jay Zee. This is totally unnecessary and gives major headache for people like me who likes to archive things properly. Darn…now I have two folders for one Norah Jones album. Thank you Job. You are smarter than Gates but nothing like Page and Brin.

There is a reason I brought up the issue of two Norah Jones folders created by iTunes. When I want to listen to Norah Jones album in Sansa Fuze, it will play all the songs in the album but one. I have to point the player to another folder with the Jay Zee song to complete my listening pleasure of the album. (Or I can waste my time to create a playlist.)

Things get worse if Jay Zee’s song is not the first one or the last one. What if it is the middle one! Am I supposed to jump folders manually in the middle? The worst is when the album is gapless and the song with an extra artist name is in the middle. Johhny Cash’s Folsom Prison is a fine example. It is a gapless album and June Carter jumps in…in the middle of the album. Thanks to iTunes, Sansa Fuze can never play this album right (unless I manual-override things creatively).

Guess what…where do you think Sansa got the idea of dropping the STOP button? Lovely iTunes, of course!

May all these bad programmers be sent to Gitmo one day! May they be accused of some crimes they did not do! May shame follow them beyond death!

 But I am truly bothered by the fact that there is this bottom ticker showing I am still on mp3 music or radio - which I am not on anymore.

Why does that bother you? It shouldn’t, at least in my opinion. It does not effect you in the slightest, only letting you know what content you were previously on before switching to the next.

And i know exactly what you mean about those folders. BUT, it has nothign to do with the folders, its the id3 tags on the songs themselves. Windows Media Player, what I use personally, does the same thing. If i do not change the artist info, it will create a seperate selection like “Norah Jones Feat. Jay-Z”. Easiest thing to do for me is to select ALL the album and change the artist at once.

To be fair, I prefer what it does now by default, as oppose to not having it. I can always change it myself if need be. I would not want it to only tell me the main artist without including featuring artist. What if I wanted to know for whatever reason?

Guess what…where do you think Sansa got the idea of dropping the STOP button? Lovely iTunes, of course!

I doubt that. As you can agree yourself, theres no need for it. I am sure it does not take much to notice that the stop button is obsolete and future generations won’t care about this because they know how it works.

Technology changes everyday, as someone with 2 computer degrees is aware. I remember attempting to rewind my DVD’s before returning them to blockbuster, only to be made fun of by some friends. I understand that you (and others) were brought up with a stop button in mind, but if times never changed, we would still be carving into rocks.

It is interesting how many people bring this up though.

The point with the music folders is by far true. I find it annoying that all these nodes are used (artists, genre, albums) it just seems useless when you can oranigze your own music in your own way.  I like the old mp3 players that used to browse by folders, but id3 has become such a huge thing and I always remove id3 tags on my mp3 collection. When I want a particular song, the file name should be enough to tell me what song it is. Mp3 players also react slower to accessing id3 tag info (be it device or application on your computer).  loading 2gb worth of songs on winamp is a pain when there are id3 tags on them all(with its setting to immediate load all tags). Sure its nice to be able to search with your media player to find a song, but if your music is organized well enough, you’ll know where your music is and if you don’t, explorer has a search feature also.  

It may or may not be true that Sansa is copying ipods, but really that’s how selling product works.  They see a trend and they follow it. it’s really hard to break or invent a new existing trends. ipod does really well at innovation (given their succes with their first ipod and maintaining their superiority) but when other competitors want in on the market of mp3 players (sansa, samsung, creative, insignia), they are somewhat forced to follow trend than to create new innovations. only option is to provide an alternative ipod that is inexpensive with mostly the same features and hope that what they “mimic” is an improvement. being innovative is risky.

also ipod doesn’t fall into just techonlogy trend, but also a fashion trend. there are many cases where people get an ipod, not knowing what they want out of an mp3 player, finding that they hate it but conform and get used to it because its a cool thing to have.

luckily there are cheap people like me who know what they want and realize an ipod is not worth its money.

thoma wrote:

The point with the music folders is by far true. I find it annoying that all these nodes are used (artists, genre, albums) it just seems useless when you can oranigze your own music in your own way.  I like the old mp3 players that used to browse by folders, but id3 has become such a huge thing and I always remove id3 tags on my mp3 collection. When I want a particular song, the file name should be enough to tell me what song it is. Mp3 players also react slower to accessing id3 tag info (be it device or application on your computer).  loading 2gb worth of songs on winamp is a pain when there are id3 tags on them all(with its setting to immediate load all tags). Sure its nice to be able to search with your media player to find a song, but if your music is organized well enough, you’ll know where your music is and if you don’t, explorer has a search feature also.  

 

It may or may not be true that Sansa is copying ipods, but really that’s how selling product works.  They see a trend and they follow it. it’s really hard to break or invent a new existing trends. ipod does really well at innovation (given their succes with their first ipod and maintaining their superiority) but when other competitors want in on the market of mp3 players (sansa, samsung, creative, insignia), they are somewhat forced to follow trend than to create new innovations. only option is to provide an alternative ipod that is inexpensive with mostly the same features and hope that what they “mimic” is an improvement. being innovative is risky.

 

also ipod doesn’t fall into just techonlogy trend, but also a fashion trend. there are many cases where people get an ipod, not knowing what they want out of an mp3 player, finding that they hate it but conform and get used to it because its a cool thing to have.

 

luckily there are cheap people like me who know what they want and realize an ipod is not worth its money.

 

 

Amen brother. Amen.

@thoma wrote:

… 

also ipod doesn’t fall into just techonlogy trend, but also a fashion trend. there are many cases where people get an ipod, not knowing what they want out of an mp3 player, finding that they hate it but conform and get used to it because its a cool thing to have.

 

luckily there are cheap people like me who know what they want and realize an ipod is not worth its money. 

 

I AGREE. YOU SAID THE TRUTH.

The most ridiculous thing about this Sansa Fuze player is that – video player is a big sham.  Though advertised on the outside of the box as being able to play MPEG-4 video, the device can never play the MPEG-4 files that play else where. YOU MUST INSTALL SANDISK’S CUSTOM PROGRAM ON YOUR COMPUTER, RUN THE JPEG AND MPEG-4 FILES THROUGH IT FOR CONVERSION.

Only those specially-digested photos and videos can be played on the FUZE. How ridiculous!

Yes, I a kind of suspect that this conversion/digestion has to do with the lack of processor power on the Sansa.

( jpeg requirements are more relax though. I’ve been successful after down-sizing my jpg’s using Photoshop. )

theres actually a limit for the jpegs. . I think its around 800kb and a resolution of 2000 x something. It’s roughly around that. Also I think certain compressions of jpeg are not supported, cause even if it meets the limits, some jpgs don’t view unless I convert them with photoresize or photoshop.

Message Edited by thoma on 04-03-2008 04:16 PM

@flymajorfly wrote:

Who came up with this idea of a car with no brakes? It stops unless you turn the key off or it hits something! How could one make a music player with no STOP button? Who are the parents of these engineers? What school they went to?

Your metaphor is very true. With a car, when you hit the brakes it pauses the car from moving, the car is however still running. Your car does not stop running until you turn the key off, as with the Fuze the player stops running when you power the player down. The Fuze pauses when you want to pause listening to the music while the player is still running. 

The only thing is that your metaphor actually pushes the opposite point that you were striving for. Good luck next time. :robotsurprised: 

Actually in my opinion some devices don’t need a stop button. Take a dvd player for example, your either watching the movie or not. You can pause the movie if you want to stop for a moment and then come back. Who really hits the stop button when their done? I just turn the dvd player off.

Same concept for a cd player who really hits stop to stop the cd? I either turn the cd player off completely or I eject the disc. Actually my Scion’s cd player doesn’t have a stop button now that I think about it. What’s the use of programming a useless function if no one really uses it the way it was intended?

While we’re on the topic of pointless functions… can we get a 8-track or record player?.. that’d be AWESOME…

But as previously explained, I’ll put it in a chart of sorts…

Stop = moving parts + battery drain  

Pause = no moving parts… scrolling text at the bottom of the screen - Backlight setting turning screen off =  no problem cause there’s no parts

there’s my pseudo math for the month, hopefully easy enough to figure out why there’s no stop as the others have stated before.

A car with no brake…I like that comparison.  But how about A car with Auto brake.  That’s even better.  I have my lazy way of stopping my music playback.  I just put it on Pause, then let the device turn itself off after 5 min later (customizable in Power Saver menu).  Then when I turn it back on, it will resume where I left off.

Enigma does not have to as arrogant and condecending as he or she is but does it anyway. A sign of imaturity and insecurity. I believe what people are asking for are better instructions on the use of their new player. The enclosed instructions are poorly written and do not contain even a third of the information that a new user needs.

I have an e280, and that is one of my favorite things about it. I go to check how much memory I have left, or see some pictures and I can still listen to the song, and if I want to go back to see how long the song is, just click the menu/power button.